Why Jews are right to suspect Obama’s advisers

Obama adviser Zbigniew Brzezinski has accused American Jews of McCarthyism for being critical of Israel’s critics. He’s not the first and he won’t be the last. The pattern, repeated over and over as we learn more about Obama’s advisers, is that one of them speaks fondly of the Palestinians or harshly of Israel, Jews get upset and someone then accuses Jews of making any rational dialog about Israel impossible. Jews, they say, are casting a pall on the debate by insisting on unconditional love for Israel as a prerequisite for any discussion about solutions in the Middle East — and that makes it impossible to achieve a solution, since it essentially cuts the Palestinians out of the debate entirely.

In a normal situation, the Obamanites might have a point. Ordinarily, if the world were focusing like a laser on a dispute between two small, bordering countries about riparian rights (or trade agreements, or power plants, or any of the ordinary disputes that might rile adjoining nations), it would be fatal to a peaceful conclusion if the external mediators entered with a preconceived bias in favor of one of the countries. But what Obama and his fellow travelers fail to understand is that the relationship between Israel and her neighbors is not a garden-variety dispute about concrete matters such as borders and water. Instead, it is a binary, existential dispute that demands the answer to a single question: Does Israel have the right to exist?

Israel and her friends say she does have the right to exist. They believe that she and her citizens should not have to worry daily that they will be utterly annihilated by one big bomb or thousands of small ones. The Palestinians and their friends, however, whether speaking through their charters, their rhetoric, their religion, or their actions, say she does not have any such right to exist — and that this is true whether one considers her as a whole nation or as a collection of individual citizens. The Palestinian side to the “debate” has made it patently clear since Israel’s inception (and before), that the beef with Israel is not about a village or a river or a water well. It’s about the genocide of a people and the destruction of a nation.

Keeping the above in mind — and I think you’ll find it a hard conclusion with which to quarrel given a sixty year history of writings, speeches, wars and bombs — the dispute about Israel cannot accurately be framed as “Israel vs. the Palestinians.” Instead, the correct framing is “Israel, alive or dead?” As I said earlier, it’s binary. There is no middle ground. Israel chooses life; the Palestinians and their cohorts choose Israel’s death. To the extent the Palestinians talk of a two state solution, they perceive this, not as an end in itself, but as a means to an end, a useful diversion to keep Europe and the American Left busy and happy while the Palestinians, Arabs and Iranians move forward with the plan for Israel’s ultimate demise.

Given that Israel’s enemies plan to deny her, not a border or a town or a river, but her existence entirely, Israel, Jews and friends of Israel have to accept that those who consistently support the Palestinians are either fools or they have an agenda. That is, they’re fools if they go around spouting off about two state solutions and peace, and completely ignore that the Palestinians give this concept lip service only. Only fools, after all, could ignore entirely the fact that, when the two-state issue was really available on the negotiating table, Arafat said no. Likewise, fools consistently overlook the reality that, when Israel makes concessions, Palestinians make none. Fools claim that no meaning can attach to the Hamas charter, Hamas rhetoric and Hamas actions, all of which make clear that Hamas seeks a Jew-free, one-state solution. And it’s clearly a fool who pretends it’s just rhetoric when Iran barely bothers to hide the fact that, once she builds the bomb, her first target will be Tel Aviv. Only a fool could pretend that a two-state solution would work if only Israel (not the Palestinians, just Israel) would give a little more, and a little more, and a little more, and a little more.

Of course, if these advisers who keep pushing the Palestinian viewpoint, all the while loudly proclaiming their support for Israel, are not fools (and how many are really that stupid?), then they must be aware of the actual Palestinian (Arab, Iranian, Muslim) final solution to the “dispute” between Israel and the Palestinians: The end of Israel’s existence, along with the slaughter of every Jew living in Israel. It is no stretch, therefore, to call these Palestinian mouthpieces in the West antisemitic. No matter how loudly they proclaim that they love Israel and the Jews and just want peace, their goal is precisely the same that Hitler sought — a Judenrein (Jew-free) world. (Remember, it was the Romans who made a desert and called it peace.)

Ultimately, when one side wants only to live in peace, and the other side seeks only blood or destruction, you have to choose your sides. There is no middle. And one when Presidential candidate consistently chooses as his advisers those who opt for the side that advances death and destruction, no matter how prettily they wrap it up in nice phrases about two state solutions and peace, you begin to get suspicious (to put it mildly).

The moment the Palestinians stop calling for and acting to achieve Israel’s destruction, I will take seriously their claim that they seek a second state (and we’ll just ignore that Jordan was created out of whole cloth decades ago to be precisely that), and I’ll be less suspicious of those in the West who are their champions.

As long as the situation on the ground is binary, though, I’m going to view as hostile those who choose the side of death over the side of life — and that’s true no matter how they protest their deep and abiding philosemitism. Until they assert that an absolute precondition for any negotiations between Israel and the Palestinians is that the latter completely renounce their ultimate goal of Israel’s complete destruction (a renunciation that must prove itself by word and deed), I have to conclude that these “peace seekers” in fact view Israel’s destruction as an acceptable result at the end of the negotiating day.

As many have said before me, if Israel were to put down her arms today, she would be destroyed utterly. If the Palestinians were to put down their arms today, there would be peace in that area of the Middle East.